Frenchy

He wrote home on Sundays, on the blue paper, in French.

The way his grandmother had told him to. Not the French of the school, the French the old nun from Normandy had beaten into the Ursuline girls on their slates in 1844; theirs. The way he talked. He sat on his bunk in hut forty-one on Sunday afternoons, after church, which was also the cinema, with the blue paper on a board on his knees and the pen with the steel nib and the little bottle of ink, and wrote it the way he would have said it on the gallery, asteur and nous-autres and un char for the motor lorries that went up and down the numbered streets all day, and la chevrette for the shrimp he did not have, and the English words that came in the middle of sentences the way they came in on the streetcar, le sergeant, le drill, la cookhouse, and he did not correct any of it, because his grandmother had said that way his father would know it was him.

He did not know how they read it at home. His grandmother would read it. She would sit at the window and read it to his father on the cane chair, out loud, in her old Ursuline voice, his French in her mouth. He thought about that while he wrote. He thought about his father hearing le drill in his grandmother’s voice, and his father’s mouth going in at the corner, or not.

He wrote about the grass. He wrote about the sergeant and the feet. He did not write about the stew.

He gave them to the corporal with the voice like a mule, who collected the mail, on Monday mornings, in their blue envelopes, addressed in his best hand to Mme Célestine Prudhomme, la quatrième cabane à gauche, l’embouchure du Bayou Saint-Jean, La Nouvelle-Orléans, Louisiane, which the corporal looked at, every week, and said nothing about.

---

On the third Monday he was sent for.

The corporal came into the hut at the end of the morning drill, when they were cleaning their rifles, which they had had for a week and did not know how to clean, and said, Proud-home, and jerked his head, and Lucien put his rifle down on the bunk and went.

He was taken across the camp. Not to the company office. Down three numbered streets and across a parade ground to a hut by the water tower that had no number on it, only a board nailed over the door with letters painted on it that he read as they came up to it. REGIMENTAL INTELLIGENCE. There was a sentry at the door with a rifle. The corporal said something to him and the sentry opened the door, and the corporal said in there, and Lucien went in.

It was a small room. A desk, a chair behind it, a chair in front of it. A stove, not lit. A map of France on the wall, a big one, printed, with the front drawn on it in red pencil from the sea to the mountains. A filing cabinet. And at the desk, writing, a captain.

He was young. Thirty, perhaps. Clean-shaven, with fair hair parted very straight and spectacles with gold rims and a uniform that fitted him, which nobody else’s in the camp did; and on the desk in front of him there was a folder, buff, with a name on it, and the name was PRUDHOMME, L. O., Pte., C Coy, 2nd Kansas, and beside the folder, in a neat pile, three blue envelopes.

His own. With his grandmother’s name on them in his best hand.

They had been opened.

---

“Sit down, Private.”

He sat down.

The captain did not look up at once. He finished writing what he was writing. Then he put the pen down and folded his hands on the desk and looked at Lucien over the gold rims of his spectacles, pleasantly, the way a man looks at you across a counter when he is about to sell you something.

“Captain Pruett,” he said. “Regimental intelligence. You’re Prudhomme.”

He said it right. Prü-dom. With the French in it. Lucien noticed that before he noticed anything else.

“Yes, sir.”

“From New Orleans.”

“From La Nouvelle-Orléans, sir.”

“Quite.” The captain looked at the folder, and opened it, and there was not much in it: his registration card, a copy of it, the one the clerk on Esplanade had written none on twice; a sheet of paper with typing on it; and the three blue envelopes’ letters, unfolded, flattened, in his own hand, asteur and nous-autres and le drill. “You write home in French.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Every week.”

“Yes, sir. To my grandmother. She reads it to my father. My father can’t read.”

“Can’t read English?”

“Can’t read, sir.”

The captain looked at him over the spectacles for a moment. Then he picked up one of the letters, the top one, last Sunday’s, and looked at it.

“It’s not very good French, is it,” he said. Not unkindly. As a fact. “I read French. I was at the Sorbonne for a year before the war. This is…” He looked for the word. “This is not the French they speak in Paris.”

“No, sir.”

“What is it?”

“It’s ours, sir.”

The captain looked at him.

“La chevrette,” said the captain, reading. “Le drill. La cookhouse. Asteur. What’s asteur?”

“Now, sir. It means now.”

“À cette heure.” The captain nodded slowly. “Of course. Seventeenth century. Extraordinary.” He put the letter down. “Private Prudhomme, I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to understand that I’m asking it of every man in this regiment who writes to anyone in the language of a state with which the Realm is at war, and that there are eleven of you, and that nobody is accusing you of anything. It’s my job to ask it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The captain took his spectacles off and folded them and put them on the folder. Without them his face was younger, and more tired, and not pleasant at all, only tired. “Whose side is your language on?”

---

Lucien sat in the chair in front of the desk and looked at him.

He did not answer at once. He did not know the answer. He knew it was a question that had an answer, and that the captain wanted it, and that there was a right one to give, in English, which was the Realm’s, sir, and that he could give it and go back to hut forty-one and clean his rifle; and he sat in the chair and did not give it, because it was not true, and because it was not false either, and because the question did not make sense in either of the languages he had.

He thought about the widow Fontenot standing up in the Opera House. I taught him to read. In French.

He thought about Achille’s letter. The paragraph in the other hand, the one that went straight across the page. It is the same language, Lucien.

“It’s on my grandmother’s side, sir,” he said.

The captain looked at him.

“She learned it from the Ursulines,” said Lucien. “In 1844. The nun was from Normandy and said our French was for the kitchen. My grandmother says it is. For the kitchen. And the lake. And the children. And the dead.” He stopped. “That’s whose side it’s on, sir.”

The captain did not say anything for a long time.

Then he put his spectacles back on, and picked up the pen, and wrote something in the folder, a short line, and closed it.

“Thank you, Private,” he said. “That’s all.”

He picked up the three blue envelopes and held them out across the desk.

Lucien took them. They had been opened along the top with a knife, neatly. The letters were inside them again, folded, the way he had folded them.

“I’m sorry about the delay,” said the captain. “They’ll go today. I’ve read them.” He looked at the folder for a moment. “Your grandmother will like the part about the grass.”

---

August Brandt was taken off the next day.

The corporal came for him at the end of morning drill too, and he went, and came back at supper with a face like a lamp, pinker than ever, and stood at the end of the long table in the cookhouse and told them. He had been sent for by the same captain in the same hut by the water tower, and the captain had talked to him in German, for an hour, and he had talked back, in the German of the dairy farms north of Milwaukee, which his grandmother had brought from somewhere near Hanover and which nobody in Germany would have recognised either; and the captain had written something in a folder, and then he had told August Brandt that he was being sent on a liaison course. At the headquarters of the division. For six weeks. And then to France, ahead of the regiment, to be attached to a German regiment on the coast as an interpreter.

“Dolmetscher,” said August Brandt, standing at the end of the cookhouse table, savouring it. “That’s what they call it. Interpreter.” He looked round the table at all of them. “They’re going to pay me another eight pence a day. For talking the way my grandma talks.”

The table cheered him. Kerrigan banged his tin plate on the table. Sol Weintraub shook his hand. The cowboy from Montana took his hat off and put it on August Brandt’s head and it came down over his ears.

Lucien sat at the end of the table beside Harlan and clapped with the rest.

He did not know what his face was doing. He was clapping and he did not know what his face was doing; and Harlan, beside him, was not clapping. Harlan was eating his stew, slowly, with his elbows on the table, and looking sideways at Lucien’s face.

---

It changed that afternoon. Not the name; the name changed the next day. The thing under the name.

It had got round. He did not know how. Somebody had seen him taken to the hut by the water tower and somebody had seen August Brandt taken the day after, and somebody had put the two together, and by the next morning everybody in C Company knew that Prudhomme had been had up by intelligence about his French letters and that Brandt had been given a course and eight pence a day for his German ones; and the men in hut forty-one looked at Lucien, at the rifle range, at drill, at the stew, the way the men in collars had looked at him on the wharf in June a year ago. Once. And away.

Not all of them. Most of them did not care. But enough.

It was Kerrigan who said it. In the cookhouse, at dinner, loudly, the next day, from across the table, with his mouth full, in the voice of a man who has thought of something funny and wants the room to hear it.

“Hey. Frenchy. Pass the bread.”

The table laughed.

Not unkindly, most of it. It was a joke; Kerrigan made jokes; it was the kind of joke men make about each other in a hut. Lucien knew that. He passed the bread.

“Thanks, Frenchy,” said Kerrigan.

By supper it was his name. Not in all of the hut. In most of it. Frenchy, at the rifle range, Frenchy, at drill, Frenchy, from the corporal with the voice like a mule, who could not say Prudhomme and could say that. The cowboy from Montana said it without meaning anything by it at all. Sol Weintraub said it once, and looked at Lucien’s face, and went red, and did not say it again.

He did not mind. He told himself he did not mind. It does not matter what they call you, Achille had written in April. It matters who is next to you.

---

Kerrigan explained himself on the Saturday.

He did not have to. Nobody had asked him to. He came and sat on the end of Lucien’s bunk in the evening, when Harlan was out at the wash house and Lucien was writing to his grandmother on the blue paper, and sat there, a big red-haired Irishman from Boston with the bruise on his face fading yellow, and looked at the blue paper.

“You know why I call you that,” said Kerrigan.

“Non,” said Lucien. And then: “No.”

“Because you’re the only one in this hut that’s on the wrong side, same as me.” Kerrigan looked at the floor. “My old man’s from Galway. Came over in ‘ninety. He says the English have had their boot on Ireland for seven hundred years and here’s the Realm, which shares a King with them, sending Boston boys to die for England’s war while England governs Ireland as it pleases. He says it in the Commons, nearly; he says it to our member, every week, and our member says it in the Commons, and gets shouted down.” He looked at the paper on Lucien’s knee. “And I got drawn anyway. And here I am. Fighting with the English. Against the French, who never did a thing to Ireland but send it a fleet once that got blown away by the weather.” He laughed, short. “And you’re fighting against the French. Who talk like you.”

“They don’t talk like me.”

“Near enough,” said Kerrigan. “Near enough for Kansas.” He got up off the end of the bunk. “So that’s why. Frenchy. It’s not meant. It’s just, you’re the only other one in here that knows what it’s like.”

He went back to his own bunk.

Lucien sat with the blue paper on his knee and did not write anything for a long time.

---

Harlan did not call him Frenchy.

He did not call him anything different at all. He went on calling him Lucky, the name he had given him at the cookhouse table on the first evening, at the rifle range and at drill and at the stew and in the hut at night, in his slow flat Nebraska voice, as if he had not heard the new one, as if there were no new one; and when the corporal with the voice like a mule shouted Frenchy! across the parade ground, Harlan looked round at the corporal with his patient interested look, as though the corporal had shouted the name of somebody who was not there, and then looked back at Lucien and said, he means you, Lucky.

They lay in their bunks that night after lights out, Lucien on top, Harlan below, in the dark, with Sergeant Cutter snoring like a saw at the end of the hut and the wind going over the grass outside the walls with its long low hiss.

“Lucky,” said Harlan, from below, very low.

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him? The captain. When he asked you whose side.”

Lucien looked at the slats of the roof in the dark.

“I said my grandmother’s.”

Harlan was quiet for a long time. Lucien thought he had gone to sleep.

“Huh,” said Harlan, at last. “That’s a good answer.” And then, after another while, sleepier: “My grandmother’s side is Sweden. She’d be on the side of whoever stopped talking about it first.”

Lucien laughed, in the dark, without any noise, so that the bunk shook a little; and below him he felt Harlan feel it shake, and say nothing, and go to sleep.